Beautiful Things
by The Lovely Cynic
Summary: Squalo thought death was a beautiful thing. //XS, madness, violence, etc.//


**Beautiful Things**

Squalo thought death was a beautiful thing.

With red pouring past paling lips and gaping wounds, skin white and ghostly as life leaked out. Eyes panicked sometimes, surprised others, always ending on a note of sorrow or regret. Then they lay still with death the only thing surrounding them.

Squalo loved to take life.

He loved the feeling of being in so control of something so important as a person's life. Life was a thread, easily severed with a sharpened blade—and Squalo held that blade. Sometimes he would make people beg him not to; made them grovel on their knees with tear-streaked cheeks and blood coating their teeth.

That was beautiful, too.

He loved then to take his sword and hold it against the person's neck; watch their eyes widened and tendons tighten before they were slowly severed as Squalo just _pushed._ He would hear the squelch of blood as arteries gushed and squirted, hear the snap of cartilage as the trachea was cut in two, hear the crunch of bone as the spinal cord was finally cut and they would fall limp.

That was disappointing.

It was all over too fast, he found. How was it that making life took so long, took so much energy and complex chemical reactions, and yet... taking that life was so simple. As infants, all you had to do was shake and that light would be put out forever. As one grew older, all there was to do was slice or shoot or stab and life would leave them.

Squalo would wipe his blade after on the cleanest piece of clothing he could find and walk away to his next mission.

* * *

Squalo thought Xanxus was a beautiful thing.

Xanxus was fury and hatred incarnate. And Squalo loved to feel it being used against him. He enjoyed the fights they would get in, the pain blooming over his body as he felt bruises forming—the blood in his mouth. Squalo would smile as a gun pushed so hard against his temple he thought he would pass out. Then the other pistol would come down to crack against his face to wipe that smile off.

Squalo would only laugh; throw his head back and laugh to the sky as he realized how utterly _perfect_ everything was. _(1)_

"Freak," Xanxus would hiss and turn away.

Squalo would clamber up, legs shaking and barely able to hold his weight. He would crawl into an adjacent bathroom, strip off his clothing and stare at his reflection until his face ghosted up with mist from warm breath.

With purple and black dotting his pale skin, white hair in matted tangles and blood still in his saliva....

Squalo thought he was beautiful, too.

* * *

Sex was a beautiful thing.

Carnal and brutal and _dangerous_—that was how he liked it. He liked it so that when he was with someone, there was a good chance he could _die_ while fucking them. Choking, punching, pulling, squeezing so hard that he could barely _stand it...._

That was how he wanted it. And that was how Xanxus gave it to him. Rough and painful and beautiful.

Even if Squalo woke up the next morning to an empty bed, in near agony with bruises everywhere and blood—among others—caking against his skin, he was sated. He felt good, so good he could ignore his throbbing, protesting body and walk around, savouring the ache as he remembered Xanxus inside of him.

And he would always go back for more to quench the emptiness.

* * *

Love was not a beautiful thing.

Love was ugly, in every sense of the word. Love was messy and dirty and interfered in things that it had no place in. It was not welcome, and yet it came anyways, always uninvited and knocking insistently at your mind until you let it in.

And when you let it in, it would never leave.

And it would be there, always there, making you think about it and ruining everything until your heart was in tatters. Love was ugly. Love was hideous. Love had no place in any place anywhere. But it always came and it always stayed.

And it would never leave.

Not really, anyways.

Not ever.

* * *

**Footnotes**: _(1):_ Kind of an ironic allusion to Buddha, I suppose. I belive the quote is _"When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky."_ I hope someone got that originally!


End file.
